Month: August 2015

Darwin received his BFA in Painting from the Kansas City Art Institute. During his time in Kansas City, viagrabuy he participated in community based non-profit for inner city youths and programs as an art educator, unhealthy lead artist, and lead muralist while also showing in local galleries. He hopes, through his work, to engage with the local community on the street level and to contribute to the development of a progressive and innovative artistic environment in Houston. The result of his artistic experimentation is rooted in processes that exploit the unpredictable intersections of materiality and form, as each of his artworks is in the first place, a reaction to itself.\n\n\n\n1. What do you do to bring art to the surrounding community?\n\nI would hope [to bring] a feeling of belonging and self awareness; a shared experience.\n\n2. How did you first get into art?\n\nIn the beginning…I think it was just my intent to materialize images from story telling.\n\n3. How has your talent evolved since you began?\n\nI try not to define or stop the direction of the an instinctual vision.\n\n4. What type of art/artist do you most identify with?\n\nPhotographers and sculptors, those who embrace material and narrative.\n\n5. What is your biggest dream as an artist?\n\nI was always fascinated by videos of Picasso drawing and his decisive, [intended] marks and movement. I would like to have that sense of intent.\n\n6. What is your favorite thing to do besides art?\n\nExplore, be outside, take in the landscape. Voyeurism.\n\n7. What was your inspiration for your part of the Collective Solid?\n\nManifesting our relationships as creatives.\n\n8. What is the most memorable thing someone has said to you about your work?\n\nI had a professor who was not my instructor, Carl Kurtz,compliment a sculpture piece of mine by saying how balanced and Zen it was. That has always stuck with me.\n\n9. How do you think people should try to find art in their daily lives?\n\nArt is everywhere, you just need to find the intent.\n\n10. Do you have any advice for aspiring artists?\n\nIf you are not creating you are not an artist.

Alex Larsen is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, generic cialis and describes his work as the \”physical realization of tactile experience.\” His work is heavily influenced by relationships between man and nature and the manner in which people choose to interact, or isolate themselves, from the natural world. His work visualizes the human reaction to the developing paradigm of secondary physical observation and suggest that tactile experience no longer seems to be the primary encounter with the physical. Using a variety of materials, both traditional and contemporary, the artist translates the process of creation so that the result synthesizes both the intended format and the forces required to create it.\n\n\n\n1. What do you do to bring art to the surrounding community?\n\nI would say that making art engages me with so many people that I otherwise wouldn’t have a connection with and if anything I make has the ability to connect people to something new then that is a success.\n\n\n2. How did you first get into art?\n\nI think as children everyone is into art because it hasn’t been defined as something different from life. Thankfully I have been able to hold on to at least some of that. But, as far as making objects, I’ve always been into building things with my hands. It seems like almost a reflex for me to be creating or arranging something.\n\n\n3. How has your skill in creating and crafting evolved since you began?\n\nLearning from other artists mostly. Trying to figure out how things are made plays a big part as well.\n\n4. What type of art/artist do you most identify with?\n\nThe weird ones.\n\n\n5. What is you biggest dream as an artist?\n\nTo make something that means something to someone, whether I know it or not. \n\n\n6. What is your favorite thing to do besides create art?\n\n\n\n\nFishing and skateboarding.\n\n7. What was your inspiration for your contribution to Collective Solid?\n\nMost of my inspiration comes from non-art locations; construction sites, dumpsters, hardware stores.\n\n\n8. What is the most memorable thing someone has said to you about your work?\n\nSomeone once told me to keep making my work. It’s a very simple idea but it works.\n\n\n9. How do you think people should try to find and appreciate art in their daily lives?\n\nIt’s all in how you choose to experience everything around you. Having to try to find something to appreciate seems like an odd idea to me.\n\n\n10. Do you have any advice for aspiring artists?\n\nI’m sure I’ll have some good advice at some point down the line.

Patrick Renner is a native Houstonian, search and received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Renner teaches art part-time at the Sharpstown International School and maintains a rigorous studio practice. His artwork has been exhibited in many venues locally and in various venues in the United States. In 2015 his sculpture Funnel Tunnel garnered critical acclaim and a national award for public sculpture. It moved to New Orleans for display earlier this summer. His presented works, tailored to this exhibition, make use of his familiar cloud motif and his signature wood-worked sculptural methodology but also incorporate kinetic and electronic applications.\n\n\n\n1. What do you do to bring art to the surrounding community?\n\nWhen possible, especially with my larger public installation pieces, I hope to bring something to the surrounding community that not only is a point of interest, but also gives all people an opportunity to contribute their creative energy to the end product.\n\n2. How did you first get into art?\n\nI would attribute my inclination toward art making to my parents: my dad is an excellent illustrator and my mom got her terminal degree in a painting and printmaking. As a kid they took me to the museums often, and we frequented galleries and even some artists’ studios, so that it became familiar while still being exciting to see the process and the outcome.\n\n3. How has your talent evolved since you began?\n\nThe woodworking skills I learned from my grandfather evolved in complexity with practice, aka trial and error. Other techniques learned from various mentors along the way cycled into my practice and have given me the ability to make many of the things I see in my head…although some still allude me on how to bring them to fruition.\n\n4. What type of art/artist do you most identify with?\n\nAlthough I tend to identify myself as a sculptor, I get a lot in the way of influence from other art genres—especially painting—as well as many things not even directly in the conversation of art. Architecture, film, culinary, quilting, music, car culture, folk art, and an equally random assortment of other things filter into my work.\n\n5. What is you biggest dream as an artist?\n\nThat my work could open doors for me to travel other places is something I would never tire of. The opportunity to see new places and meet new people as a result of my creative endeavors has been my goal from early on in my art career.\n\n6. What is your favorite thing to do besides creating art?\n\nWatching movies, reading, social discourse (preferably over beers).\n\n7. What was your inspiration for your part of the Collective Solid?\n\nAll the works I made for this show used the stylized cloud icon. It has persisted as an interesting image to me because it can encompass a variety of ideas. Cloud gazing is an activity that may be as old as history, something people did well before the invention of any of the devices that tend to occupy so much of people’s time nowadays as a diversion. When cloud gazing, people are free to let their minds wander and the associative exercise of identifying pictures in the clouds can be quite fun and amusing. In general, my interest in presenting an artwork is that it become a container/a place for people to map their own ideas onto; for me there’s no such thing as right or wrong associations, just like with cloud gazing.\n\nConversely, since clouds are tied to weather and storms, there can also be a melancholy or tumultuous quality to the image. The ‘silver lining’ notion is one that’s been personally poignant for a period of time in my life, so it’s a useful symbolic device. And in regards to the show title Collective Solid, I love that clouds are just that…something that takes form out of a nebulous conglomeration of water vapor; the mutable nature of our ideas and working methods as artists in the show is akin to a shape-shifting cloud moving across the sky.\n\n8. What is the most memorable thing someone has said to you about your work?\n\nI don’t remember.\n\nMaybe when a guy in a car yelled at me while I was working on an outdoor piece: “I know what it is, but what’s it gonna BE?!”\n\n9. How do you think people should try to find art in their daily lives?\n\nTo me it’s not a requirement, like something people should do, and it definitely shouldn’t be forced. Having said that, I think everyone oughta enjoy whatever it is they feel excited by in the aesthetic realm.\n\nWhen you see a beautiful thing enjoy the beautiful thing. Maybe that’s a sunset, or an attractive person, or a beautifully decayed building that has weathered into a divine wreck. Eat delicious food, drink good drinks. Listen to music that transports you to a higher plane emotionally (happy, sad, etc.). Wear the clothes that feel comfortable and that express your self-expression.\n\nAnd if you’re so-inclined, go look at some capital A-R-T. If not, maybe get some ice cream or something.\n\n10. Do you have any advice for aspiring artists?\n\nAspire. It’s your most powerful tool to get where you want to go.\n\nRemember, you are the only one who knows the nuanced beauty of what that picture of your success looks like, the one in which your dreams are coming true for your future self.

Jonathan Paul Jackson is a native Texan. He is a self-taught artist working in Houston. Having apprenticed with and been influenced by Houston artists Angelbert Metoyer and Robert Hodge, ailment Jackson has inserted himself into a heritage of Houston art-making that begins, in some ways with patriarchal figures in Houston art Jesse Lott and Bert L,. Long, Jr. His artworks are the result of experiments in abstraction as he forages a new philosophy toward painting that is at once his own as well as part of a larger dialogue about the nature of painting and perception, executed through the filer of an African American perspective.\n\n\n\n1. What do you do to bring art to the surrounding community?\n\nI have been organizing art shows for emerging artist between the age of 17-35 at alternative spaces for the past 11 years in Houston.\n\n2. How did you first get into art?\n\nI have been naturally curious of art since I was a young child. Luckily enough my uncle and brother could draw really well so they taught me at about the age of 11.\n\n3. How has your talent evolved since you began?\n\nYes, for sure. And I hope it continues to do so.\n\n4. What type of art/artist do you most identify with?\n\nMy art has been called abstract expressionism. I mean there’s the obvious Jean-Michel Basquiat. But I love the work and philosophy of Albert Oehlen who’s a German Abstract Expressionist.\n\n5. What is you biggest dream as an artist?\n\nTo live incredibly comfortably off of selling my art work and have sculptures or installations in 5 major international cities.\n\n6. What is your favorite thing to do besides art?\n\nCooking and having dinner parties with friends. I also enjoy riding bikes.\n\n7. What was your inspiration for your part of the Collective Solid?\n\nPushing myself and my imagination in a different direction.\n\n8. What is the most memorable thing someone has said to you about your work?\n\nHaving an important mentor tell me to make art for myself and if others like it than that’s just a plus.\n\n9. How do you think people should try to find art in their daily lives?\n\nThey shouldn’t feel that have to find it. It’s everywhere. Maybe read about different disciplines in art. So when they are in their everyday lives they will be able to recognize the art that exist around them every day and when they go to museums and galleries they approach the work with a different mind set. I hope that makes sense.\n\n10. Do you have any advice for aspiring artists?\n\nNever stop working. Always be making art. Always have a sketch book out when not painting. And when not sketching or painting, be gathering resource material. Always be working.

David Adam Salinas considers photography historically as being a medium that is most often associated with clarity, sildenafil free from any artifacts from which it was made. His aesthetic approach highlights the process of analog photo making with chemistry, the paper it is printed on, and evidence of hand crafted or applied alternative materials. He uses solvents and paints combined with custom developing recipes to manipulate the image in the same manner a painter would approach a canvas. He combines traditional darkroom photographic techniques with his own devices to produce a final image from his experience that weaves the subject matter of the photograph with the final treatments of the processes employed.\n\n\n\n1. What do you do to bring art to the surrounding community?\n\nI feel I like to get out in the surrounding area of the studio. I take portraits of the people in that community. They’re mainly \”street people,\” but it’s for me it’s different because I have developed a relationship with them. Almost everyone I photograph on the street loves that I spend time with them, it’s nice to not be ignored. I go out of my way to communicate with them because they deserve that. That’s what they want, not the money or the sympathy, but to be acknowledged. I know the story behind the image… that’s what I bring that’s different.\n\n2. How did you first get into photography?\n\nI’ve always wanted to be an artist. I tried painting, but I never developed an artistic manner. I grew up idolizing artists, it was a path I always wanted to follow, but I didn’t have the knowledge. I didn’t have the training to get there. Five or six years ago, I got really into photography. I would just read endless articles and watch videos to really learn. I got a job at a camera store, being around people in the photography community taught me so much. It was amazing hands on learning. I felt like I learned more than my friends who were taking classes at the local universities. The path I chose to take has really benefited my passion.\n\n3. What type of art do you most identify with?\n\nPainting. My photography gives more of a painterly feel, you can tell it was created by hand. I love the uncommonness to the tone. Its something handmade and the gesture is left with the image. That’s why I identify most with painters.\n\n4. What is your biggest dream as an artist? \n\nTo be remembered. I want to have images that will last, something that is iconic.\n\n5. What is your favorite thing to do besides photography?\n\nSleep, I never do.\n\n6. What was your inspiration for your part of Collective Solid?\n\nJust being around the group and knowing your’re part of something big. Being the inexperienced one in the group motivates me to make something great so I can feel like I belong with them.\n\n7. What is the most memorable thing someone has said to you about your work?\n\nA few years ago at a show I was showing photographs at, an older woman told me she loved my watercolors. She taught my photographs can be interpreted wildly differently and that meant so much.\n\n8. How do you think people should try to find art in their daily lives?\n\nTo just be a good observer. Seeing what would make a good photo or composition.\n\n9. Do you have any advice for aspiring artists?\n\nIt is important to have an incredible drive. There will always be set backs, but the drive to keep going early on will really set you apart.